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Due to the United States dependency on maritime travel, the proliferation of efficient and inexpensive naval mines poses a tremendous risk. Current MCM technologies have narrow FOVs, preventing timely, wide-area searches. These technologies require the operator to be in proximity to the targets, a dangerous scenario made worse when in denied territory. In an effort to mitigate these risks, the use of a high altitude hyperspectral sensor is proposed. The operational ability of a hyperspectral sensor to detect sub-pixel surface and submerged mines in non-littoral environments was evaluated using visual inspection and two common anomaly detectors Mixture Tuned Matched Filtering (MTMF) and Reed-Xiaoli (RX). Due to the unavailability of the DoDs Spectral Infrared Imaging Technology Testbed (SPIRITT), ProSpecTIR-VS3, a sensor similar spatially and spectrally to SPIRITT was flown over a range offshore California. This experiment included three surface and three submerged targets, each with a 0.8 meter diameter. Both 0.5 and 1 meter spatial resolution data were collected, allowing for both a resolved and unresolved analysis. While both anomaly detection techniques have their flaws, the success of this study is in proving the usefulness of hyperspectral data for sub-pixel mine detection.

Hyperspectral imaging spectrometers produce an image, comprised of the standard two dimensional spatial scene and the corresponding spectra of each scene. Hyperspectral imaging is a relatively new and fast growing field ...

One of the United States Navy Oceanographic community's roles is to keep an accurate worldwide database of oceanic bathymetry. In the littoral zones, much of the data is out of date or is unavailable. Stuffle et al. (1996) ...

Military image analysts primarily use panchromatic and radar images to aid situational awareness in preparing a mission plan. Although analysts rely on these two formats, there are situations where these two sensors are ...